Stranger’s Wrath Isn’t Cancelled, Devs Have ‘Given Up On Microsoft’
Just Add Water, the developer behind the HD version of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath has commented on the rumor of the game being cancelled. They’ve let us know that the game wasn’t put up on the shelf, but the developer has “given up on Microsoft” due to the company’s failure to push forward with the game’s release.
Studio head Stewart Gilray spoke with VG247 and shed some light on earlier comments he made that led to the rumor being started in the first place. He explained that Just Add Water had, and still has, no plans to scrap the game, but Microsoft isn’t wanting to cooperate and get the game to launch.
“What I said was that we’d given up on Microsoft, not that we’d given up on 360,” Gilray stated. “What I meant was that we’d given up on Microsoft having anything to do with it.” Gilray explains that the game’s HD code has been complete and sitting for some time, and Microsoft approached the team about getting an HD version of Stranger’s Wrath on their console in the first place. The developer was approached by Microsoft after the HD version of the game was announced for the PS3.
“Two weeks [after the announcement] Microsoft contacts us and asked if we wanted to do a 360 version. We said yes. Just before Christmas, they came back and said they didn’t want it because it’d already been on a Microsoft platform. We said, ‘Hang on a minute. We didn’t come to you. You approached us.’ They said, ‘Yeah, but politics here says that we don’t want it on XBLA.’”
The team worked with Microsoft to try and get the game distributed via the Games on Demand service instead of XBLA, but the idea fell through. An issue came up that would have the game releasing at $20, when it already launched for $15 on the PS3. Because of this they couldn’t go through with the plan. In January of this year one last effort was pushed through to get the game to release. When Just Add Water submitted the idea back to Microsoft, they were told that the team had let everything go because the game had already been released on the PS3 some months earlier.
“We said, ‘We’ve been talking to you for over 15 months now’,” Gilray said. “We haven’t stalled. You’ve been stalling us. If you’d come to us six months ago and said fine, we would have held back the PS3 version until the 360 version was ready. We can’t wait forever. If we did, PS4 and 720 would be out. We have to, at some point, say, ‘We tried.’ And that’s sooner rather than later now. But people can’t accuse us of not trying.”
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath was an amazing game. It’s sad to think the game won’t make it out anytime soon. There is some hope, though, as Just Add Water is working with two publishers who are interested in helping them get the game to release on XBLA. The game was announced back in 2010 and launched on the PS3 in December of 2011. If we do see the game on the 360 at some point, Gilray claims that it won’t be the exact same version “because Microsoft dragged us along for 15 months, we’re now having to add new content to the 360 version.”
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